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WASHINGTON, D.C. – U.S. Senator Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.) today joined “America’s Newsroom” on Fox News to discuss the crisis at the southern border, the $1.9 trillion spending bill, and the need for bipartisanship moving forward.

HIGHLIGHTS:

ON THE CRISIS AT THE SOUTHERN BORDER: “If this isn’t a crisis, I don’t know what is. The Department of Homeland Security is projecting 117,000 unaccompanied minors coming across our border. February was the largest month ever and we’re holding these children with DHS longer than they are supposed to be held. Where’s the outrage? I certainly feel outraged because I think it’s a direct result of the signaling and the policies that the president says he’s going to put into place…The outrage that we’ve heard over the last four years was all about the children who were being held for too long and for an extended period of time – that’s exactly what’s happening, only the numbers are even bigger.”

ON WHY SHE’S VOTING NO ON $1.9T BILL: “I’m voting no…The package is just bloated with a trillion dollars of extraneous items that are not for the targeted emergency relief that the 10 of us Republican went to the White House to offer. We see the numbers today, the economy is recovering. More people are working. There still is a lot of help to be done, especially on the health side and on the unemployment side. We were willing and ready to go there but when we have all these other things in there to the tune of a trillion dollars, that’s a nonstarter to me.”

ON POTENTIAL AMENDMENTS TO THE SPENDING BILL: “Two of the things I’m going to look to try to amend the bill to is to expand the use of these dollars for broadband deployment, particularly in rural America…there are no specific broadband dollars in here and that’s a bipartisan issue. The other thing is infrastructure. We’re getting ready to do a big, bipartisan infrastructure package. Let’s use some of these dollars to fill that gap that we always have with the gas tax to pay for this. There again, another bipartisan issue…if we can improve it I think we should.”

ON MISSED OPPORTUNITY FOR BIPARTISANSHIP: “That’s the big disappointment here…we’ve had five bipartisan COVID packages. This was the perfect bill to demonstrate to the country that we can and will work together and we have the best intentions to try and solve this pandemic issue. This is where we should have joined together.”

ON WORKING WITH THE WHITE HOUSE MOVING FORWARD: “We are going to have infrastructure…I’m an optimist. This is an area we’ve worked together before and hopefully it’s something we can do together again…I’ve been in the Oval Office twice and he said the same exact thing and he seems willing himself to negotiate.”

 

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